[from Editing MACroS] The ne plus ultra of hacker editors, a
programmable text editor with an entire LISP system inside it. It was
originally written by Richard Stallman in TECO under
ITS at the MIT AI lab; AI Memo 554 described it as
“an advanced, self-documenting, customizable, extensible real-time
display editor”. It has since been reimplemented any number of
times, by various hackers, and versions exist that run under most major
operating systems. Perhaps the most widely used version, also written by
Stallman and now called “GNU EMACS” or
GNUMACS, runs principally under Unix. (Its close
relative XEmacs is the second most popular version.) It includes
facilities to run compilation subprocesses and send and receive mail or
news; many hackers spend up to 80% of their tube
time inside it. Other variants include
GOSMACS, CCA EMACS, UniPress EMACS, Montgomery
EMACS, jove, epsilon, and MicroEMACS. (Though we use the original all-caps
spelling here, it is nowadays very commonly ‘Emacs’.) Some
EMACS versions running under window managers iconify as an overflowing
kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature the editor does not (yet)
include. Indeed, some hackers find EMACS too
heavyweight and baroque for
their taste, and expand the name as ‘Escape Meta Alt Control
Shift’ to spoof its heavy reliance on keystrokes decorated with
bucky bits. Other spoof expansions include
‘Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping’ (from when that was a
lot of core), ‘Eventually
malloc()s
All Computer Storage’, and ‘EMACS Makes A Computer Slow’
(see recursive acronym). See also
vi.